Urban Policy and Research

Beyond the capital city: challenges and opportunities of smaller cities for national urban policy in Australasia.

The Planning Institute of Australia has raised concerns that Australia lacks a national settlement strategy. The 2023 Federal budget included support for a “national approach for sustainable urban development” and a “cities program”.  Then in May 2024, the Australian Government released a National Urban Policy Consultation Draft.  Finally, it would seem serious moves are afoot to consider what and how a national settlement strategy might look like. The New Zealand Planning Institute, while using different terminology, identifies similar sentiments, calling for a national direction for the planning system, a national spatial plan and a considered response to the fundamental question of where urban growth should and should not occur. 

A critical component of these concerns would be a deeper understanding of the economic, social and environmental concerns and potential of second-tier or medium-sized cities: thinking beyond the major capital cities that have long dominated growth and policy thinking.  In Australia, despite an intermittent discourse around decentralisation, the last substantive effort toward high-level urban policy was the DURD Growth Centres program of the 1970s, which supported a series of new centres of 100,000-500,000 people - only some of which were realised, and all of which have subsequently been overshadowed by the growth of Sydney and Melbourne. In New Zealand, the population size of NZ cities is less than one million except Auckland, but nationwide population growth has been outstanding due to international migrants. Unprecedented population growth is taking place in the largest cities and regional towns in New Zealand. Hence, the NZ government established the “New Zealand Migrant Settlement and Integration Strategy”.  A constellation of shifts in the wake of COVID, technological, economic and environmental changes all have the potential to challenge the capital city focus of planning agendas in Australasia.  

Although there is growing international literature on the place of the ‘second tier’ or ‘medium’ level of settlement, often expressed in terms of ‘overshadowing’ by larger cities or ‘borrowing’ of agglomeration benefits of larger cities, these approaches have barely been considered in the Australasian context.  While the notions of ‘sea-change’ and ‘tree-change’ population shifts are well-known, the planning and economic implications remain underexplored, as does the significance of proximity to larger cities. 

This special edition of Urban Policy and Research will address these gaps in knowledge while directly engaging with and influencing what seems to be a significant policy re-evaluation of settlement options.  For the purposes of this special edition, we define a second-tier/medium-sized city as  a) not a state capital city; b) less than around 500,000 inhabitants; c) more than around 20,000 inhabitants. 

Our intention is to produce a collection of papers that address planning policy and research issues on the following themes:

• Links and relationships between second-tier/medium-sized cities and primary cities.
• The impact of Covid-19 on settlement patterns. 
• The vulnerability of regional cities in the face of climate change, expressed particularly in fire and flood.
• Examples of how medium-sized cities can or are countering the increasing concern of the sustainability of rapidly growing larger cities, where property prices, car-dependency and spatial mismatch of jobs and residential areas are undermining the agglomeration benefits that typically occur in such larger settlements.  
• The role that medium-sized cities could or should play in national economic development, including international linkages into global production networks and supply chains. 
• Research on how smaller cities have emerged, including Australasian new towns and the lessons for urban development.
• Research that compares smaller cities in terms of success or failure from an urban policy perspective.     

Guest Editorial Contacts:

• Anthony Kent – anthony.kent@rmit.edu.au
• Hyungmin Kim - hyungmin.kim@unimelb.edu.au
• Liz Taylor – liz.taylor@monash.edu